Abu Ayyub al-Masri

Abu Ayyub al-Masri (1968-10 April 2010) was the leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq from 2006 to 2010 and War Minister of the Islamic State of Iraq from 2006 to 2010. He fought the United States during the Iraq War, and was killed in an attack on his Tikrit safehouse alongside Abu Omar al-Baghdadi.

Biography
"Abu Ayyub al-Masri" means "father of Ayyub the Egyptian", and was born in 1968 in Egypt. In 1982 he joined Ayman al-Zawahiri's Egyptian Islamic Jihad movement and in 1999 moved to the al-Farouk Camp in Afghanistan, where he learned how to master truck explosives. He became a teacher in Yemen but he became a leader of the Islamic State of Iraq in the Iraq War of 2003-2011, and after the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, al-Masri became the new leader of the Al-Qaeda in Iraq.

In 2010, the Iraqi Army launched an attack on his Lake Tharthar compound near Tikrit, finding al-Masri and Abu Omar al-Baghdadi in the compound. The two were killed by the Iraqi army, and al-Masri was shot in the head, causing a gory mess. Pictures of the gruesome bodies of al-Masri and al-Baghdadi were released by the government of Iraq, and the two main leaders of the Iraqi insurgency were confirmed as dead.